Thursday, April 23, 2009

Evidence Explained: citation guide for historical sources

Historians are well-versed in using the Chicago Manual of Style as a guide to citing historical sources. Green Library also holds an additional, valuable guide to citing historical sources, Evidence Explained, by Elizabeth Shown Mills. Containing over 1000 citation models, ranging from civil and religious censuses to wills and probate files, Evidence Explained provides essential citation models for many primary source documents not covered in the Chicago Manual of Style.

Monday, April 13, 2009

New content in Women and Social Movements

Alexander Street Press has recently announced a new release of the database Women and Social Movements in the United States. The new release brings the collection to over 35,000 documents (nearly 150,000 pages of text) and includes a new interface.

Stanford provides access to the Scholar's Edition of Women and Social Movements. New contentincludes:

Two new document projects (for a total of over 90 projects) are included:

How Did Women’s Antislavery Fiction Contribute to Debates about Gender, Slavery, and Abolition, 1828-1856?, by Holly M. Kent.

How Did American and Japanese Gender Hierarchies Shape Japanese Women’s Participation in the Transnational WCTU Movement in the 1880s?, by Rumi Yasutake.

According to the release from Alexander Street Press,

"Owners of the Scholar’s Edition will also gain access to more than 72,000 pages of additional State Commissions on the Status of Women, as well as the fifth volume of the biographical dictionary, Notable American Women , which is now complete.
This release also introduces “document archives,” which bring additional primary source documents to the collection. Like the document projects which have been in the collection all along, document archives are primary source documents organized by topic. The difference is that the archives contain less scholar commentary and more primary source documents, giving historians and their students the opportunity to form their own interpretation of the sources. In other words, the archives present primary sources without the pedagogical apparatus. Each archive is prefaced by just a brief introductory essay, but no abstract or annotated sources (as users will find in the more scholarly document projects).

The first document archive is featured in this release and was assembled by scholar Jana Brubaker. The archive focuses on Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a noted Boston reformer in the first third of the twentieth century. This archive contains 79 documents."

New content in America's Historical Newspapers

Readex, publisher of America's Historical Newspapers, a series of databases available to Stanford users, has recently added new content. Here are the new newspaper titles in Series I-V of America's Historical Newspapers, with numbers of issues available and date ranges:

Series I: Times Picayune, New Orleans, Louisiana, 128 issues, 1/1/1837-6/30/1837.

Series II: Duluth News-Tribune, Duluth, Minnesota, 144 issues, 5/16/1881-10/31/1881.

Series III: Emporia Gazette, Emporia, Kansas, 155 issues, 4/1/1896-9/30/1896.

Series IV: American Sentinel, New York, NY, 54 issues, 1/2/1890-1/29/1891.

Series V: Sedan Lance, Sedan, Kansas, 135 issues, 8/24/1892-4/25/1895.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: America and West Indies, 1574-1739 now online

The Calendars of State Papers, Colonial: America and the West Indies are a key resource for the study of colonial America. As part of a new subscription to British History Online, a database sponsored by the Institute of Historical Research (UK), American historians now have online access to this valuable primary source. A print volume of this set is also available in the British documents section on W2 in Green Library.

The Calendars of State Papers are summaries of hundreds of thousands of handwritten documents relating to the administration of England, and its foreign relations, in the early modern period. This set, originally published in 40 print volumes, includes more than 44,000 transcripts and extended abstracts from 1574 to 1739 dealing with colonial affairs (drawn from manuscripts at the National Archives-UK). The material covers a wide range of subject areas, including orders and grants from central government to local administration; the slave trade; piracy; agriculture; boundary disputes; reports of conferences with Native Americans; plantations; immigration; land grants; industries such as shipbuilding and fisheries; relations with the French, Spanish, and Dutch, including intercepted letters; trade; privateering; war; and reports of court cases.